Volume 16, Issue IV

April is a busy time of the year, both at work and in the industry, as well as at home. Needless to say that there is a lot going on as you will see in this April 2016 edition of the Server StorageIO Update newsletter. Highlights at a glance include:

This post is the first in a multi-part series based on a white paper hands-on lab report I did compliments of Servers Direct and Seagate that you can read in PDF form here. The focus is looking at the Servers Direct (www.serversdirect.com) converged Content Solution platforms with Seagate Enterprise Hard Disk Drive (HDD‘s). I was given the opportunity to do some hands-on testing running different application workloads with a 2U content solution platform along with various Seagate Enterprise 2.5” HDD‘s handle different application workloads. This includes Seagate’s Enterprise Performance HDD’s with the enhanced caching feature.. Read more here.

Happy Earth Day 2016 Eliminating Digital and Data e-Waste For those involved in data management or data infrastructures, the following are five tips to help cut the overhead and resulting impact of digital e-waste and later physical e-waste. Most conversations involving e-waste focus on the physical aspects from disposing of electronics along with later impacts. While physical e-waste is an important topic, lets expand the conversation including other variations of e-waste including digital. By digital e-waste I’m referring to the use of physical items that end up contributing to traditional e-waste. Read more here.

VMware is looking for candidate beta test sites and environments for an upcoming vSphere release. Target audience or environments are those who have deployed vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 in your environment and looking to test the new software (e.g. bits).

Dell sells Perot systems to NTT to free up cash for upcoming EMC acquisition. In other news, Dell announced new Converged Infrastructure (CI) and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions. These include enhancements to existing Dell based solutions, partnering with Nutanix, as well as reselling EMC VCE based offerings. Read more here.

IBM announces new FlashSystems including A9000 and A9000R that have data footprint reduction (DFR) capabilities including global deduplication, real-time compression, thin-provisioning and space saving snapshots along with encryption. These are in addition to all flash array (AFA) DS8888 based storage systems and existing FlashSystem 900 and V9000 solutions.

Intel announces new faster Broadwell based processors enabling new servers, Internap announced bare metal as a service (BMaaS), Lenovo announces new Intel based servers.

Micron announces new NVM flash-based SSD products including SAS, SATA and NVMe. These include PCIe based NVMe Add in Card (AiC) and U.2 (8639) drives for the data center with the 9100 series, U.2 (2.5" 8639 interface drives) and M.2 mini card 7100 series, as well as 12Gb SAS SSD drives. Micron also announced NVM SSD based accelerated storage solutions with Ceph, Nexenta Edge and VMware VSAN. Micron also gave an update on the progress of 3D XPoint development.

Seagate announces worlds first USB powered desktop HDD. Did anybody else catch that announcement and say hmm, thinking about the USB powered and connected HDDs they have used for years if not decades? So here’s what’s new and why context is important. While there have been USB connected large capacity form factor drives (e.g. 3.5") for years, those have relied upon external power via power cord or from an enclosure chassis. Likewise, there have been small form factor 2.5" USB connected drives for well over a decade that get their power via the USB connector such as for laptop external storage etc.

What Seagate has now announced is a 3.5" form factor drive such as an 8TB model that not only connects to a USB port, it also draws its power from the USB port. Granted there are caveats such as type of USB port and how much power your USB port has so check out the speeds and feeds. Just think, now you can have an 8TB HDD attached to your laptop or tablet that has 1TB NVM NAND Flash SSD internal storage, or something like that.

Spectralogic announces new tape solutions for backup, data protection and big data. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS released that includes OpenStack and Ceph support among other enhancements. By the way, if you were not aware, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS runs native on IBM zSeries mainframe in addition to standard Intel, AMD and ARM processors. Virtual Instruments and Load Dynamix merge while CEO John Thompson exits, while Western Digital Enhances Its Data center Portfolio With WD Gold Hard Drives, and wrapping up the news for this month ZStor announces all flash array (AFA) over fabric using NVMe.

The above is a sampling of some of the various industry news, announcements and updates for this April. Watch for more news updates in May coming out of EMCworld among other events along with more on OpenStack, NVM/Flash/SSD, WIndows, VMware, CI/HCI/CiB, software defined and related topics.

The following are various recommended reading including books, blogs and videos. If you have not done so recently, also check out the Intel Recommended Reading List (here) where you will also find a couple of mine as well as books from others.